DVD of the Week: “Beware of a Holy Whore”

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s tenth feature, 1970’s “Beware of a Holy Whore” (which I discuss in this clip), is included in the crucial new boxed set “Early Fassbinder,” from Criterion. The movie is in one of my favorite genres, the inside-movie movie—and it’s a remarkably precocious entry: Fassbinder was twenty-six when he made it. The rapidity, consistency, and diversity of his movies—added to their sheer cinematic inspiration—combine to make one of the great wonders of the time. He relied on a repertory company of actors and crew members, and he worked sometimes with virtually no cash in hand, sometimes with producers, sometimes with TV money. He lived furiously and channelled his experience (as here) into his films, but he also built films from classic genres, tabloid headlines, and political events, and invested them all with a sensibility—and a visual style—that is one of the most distinctive and protean in the modern cinema. “I can sleep when I’m dead,” he said; he died at thirty-seven.

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